On June 1s6, 2014, Colleen and I were invited to participate to an international workshop on GAMING, ART, AND CULTURE in Siena, Italy organized by Pier Luigi Sacco and Nicola Tripet. The event took place in the Bibliotechina of Santa Maria della Scala, located in Piazza del Duomo, a truly outstanding venue.
Source: Santa Maria della Scala, Wikipedia
Participants included Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen (Serious Games Interactive), Panagiotis Petridis (Serious Games Istitute), Paul Manwaring (Glimworm), Davide Spallazzo & Ilaria Mariani (Politecnico di Milano), Ian Bogost (Persuasive Games), and Matteo Bittanti & Colleen Flaherty (COLL.EO),
Below is our presentation, that we are sharing to foster a broader conversation.
As always, there are links embedded in the main text.
GAME DESIGN, CRITICAL PLAY, GAME ART
Matteo Bittanti and Colleen Flaherty (COLL.EO)
Hello everybody. It is a pleasure to be here in Siena. Colleen and I would like to thank Pierluigi Sacco, Nicola Tripet and the City of Siena for inviting us to speak today and to share our ideas with our esteemed colleagues.
In our talk, we will address three main themes: Game Design, Critical Play, and Game Art. We will provide provide specific examples, case studies, and situations, based on our practice as artists, scholars, and gamers. A disclaimer: this is not your average artist's talk.
First thing first.
WHAT IS COLL.EO?
In 2012, Colleen Flaherty and I formed COLL.EO, an artistic collaboration that have so far generated approximately twenty projects, artworks, and performances, some of which have been exhibited in the United States and in Europe. COLL.EO has also become a catalyst for several initiatives, including Random Parts, an artist-run space located in Oakland, California and CONCRETE PRESS an independent publisher specializing in art, culture, and media. We are currently in Italy to work on a site-specific installation that we wll unveiled later this year.
Source: Colleen Flaherty, studio shot, 2012
SO, WHO ARE WE?
Let's introduce each other:
Colleen Flaherty is a visual artist trained as a painter and a sculptor. She received her M.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco in 2002 and her B.F.A. Cum Laude, with emphasis in Painting and Drawing, Minor in Music from San Jose State University, San Jose, California in 1998.
Matteo Bittanti is an interdisciplinary artist born in Milan, Italy. His interventions lie at the intersection between videogames, toys, cinema, and the web. Bittanti's works have been presented in the United States, Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, France, and Italy. Bittanti currently teaches in the Visual Studies (VS) and in the Visual & Critical Studies (VCS) programs at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. Previously, Bittanti was at Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, IULM, the European Instiute of Design (IED) and Brera's New Academy of Art (NABA) in Milan.
Now back to Matteo Bittanti.
GAME STUDIES
In addition to my artistic practice, I have been researching videogames since the 1980s. Together with Gianni Canova, I created LUDOLOGICA, Italy’s first academic book series on Game Studies published by Edizioni Unicopli. Today, LUDOLOGICA comprises more than 30 books about videogames, in monograph and anthological format. The series has spawned several spin-offs, stand-alone projects, exhibitions, workshops, and more. As I speak, there are five new titles currently in production. The next volume will be released shortly.
Source: Ludologica, art by Mauro Ceolin
OK, WHAT DO WE DO?
According to 500 words, the bot that authored our artist statement,
COLL.EO creates media artworks, mobile sculptures, and conceptual pieces. With the use of appropriated materials which are borrowed from a day-to-day context, COLL.EO uses a visual vocabulary that addresses several different artistic, social, and political issues. Our work incorporates time as well as space – a fictional and experiential universe that only emerges bit by bit and piece by piece. The switch between the analog and the digital is simultaneously sudden and subtle. COLL.EO generates situations in which everyday objects - often toys and games - are altered or detached from their original contexts. COLL.EO's works are a drawn reflection upon the art of media art itself.
SO WHAT?
This introduction was not meant as a captatio benevolentiae, i.e., a winning of goodwill of some sort. It is meant to provide a framework and an explanation. Both Colleen and I approach games - digital and traditional - as an object of study but also as raw material that can be collected, appropriated, détourned, subverted and re-purposed to create something else.
Something different.
This requires a bit of contextualization.
In his seminal Manifesto of Machinism, penned in 1938 and published in 1952, Bruno Munari wrote:
We live in a world owned by machines. We live among them, they help us do everything, from working to playing. [...] In a few years, we will become their little slaves. The artists are the only ones who can save mankind from this danger.
According to Munari, artists must develop a close relationship with technology, abandoning the traditional disciplines of painting and sculpture, doing away with “romantic brushes, the dusty palette, the canvas, and the easels.”
The artists, Munari added, “must learn the mechanical anatomy of the machines, their mechanical language, their nature... They must distract them, make them behave erratically, create works of art with the machines, their tools.”
And that's what we re trying to do: create art with machines.
For us, games and toys are not a mere technology, a form of entertainment.
Instead, they are an artform.
Our talk, however, is not concerned with the Art of Games.
We are much more interested in the Games of Art.
To clarify this point, I would like to add that I have been teaching a course at California College of the Arts called GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames for several years. Based on an eponymous book that I wrote with Domenico Quaranta in 2006, GameScenes investigates the relationship between contemporary art and videogames.
Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, some ask if videogames can be considered Art. GameScenes asks whether the invention of videogames has not transformed the entire character of art.
Source: Matteo Bittanti, Domenico Quaranta, GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames, Johan & Levi, 2006
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
It means that my students and I spend an entire semester studying artists who use games as a metaphor and medium, object and subject, strategy and tactic in their practice. You see, most gamers play games. Artists, on the other hands, play with games. California College of the Arts' students are both gamers and artists. They play games and they play with games. They are equally familiar with Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims as they are with contemporary artist Chris Burden.
Source: GameScenes Syllabus Walkthough, 2014
In other words, these students know and understand Game Art.
This should not be a surprise. As Johan Huizinga cogently demonstrated in Homo Ludens (1938), "All art derives from play" (65).
According to the Dutch historian, play is what makes art possible. These two practices inform, intersect, and enrich each other.
This is why a place like California College of the Arts is ideal to study and, why not, develop new kinds of games.
Which brings us to the first topic of our talk.
Source: California College of the Arts, logo designed by Mark Fox, 2003
[RETHINKING] GAME DESIGN
Last year, I was asked by California College of the Arts' Provost to design a new Program in Game Design, which would complement the School's existing twenty three programs. I spent approximately one year working on this project, which led me to think, or rather, rethink the meaning, purpose, and essence of game design.
I had previously designed a Game Design program from scratch more than a decade ago, while I was teaching at the European Institute of Design (IED) in Milan, not to mention several Game Studies classes at other institutions, both in Italy and in the United States.
But this was a different game altogether.
The first question I asked myself was: Why create a Game Design program at California College of the Arts?
The question is not as rhetorical as it may sound. Although the answer may seem obvious - from an administrative point of view, that is - the real issue is:
What kind of Game Design program is currently missing from the gamescenes, pardon, scenes?
You may be aware that the State of California offers a plethora of excellent Game Design Programs at both graduate and undergraduate level.
University of Southern California's Game Innovation Lab led by Professor Traci Fullerton is one them. Housed within the Media Division of USC' School of Cinematic Arts, the Game Innovation Lab can boost collaborations with Bill Viola, game adaptations of Walden, and other cutting edge projects. No wonder USC has been ranked the best Game Design program in the United States for four consecutive years by The Princeton Review (2013).
Equally impressive is UCLA GameLab, which not only offers state-of-the-art courses, but also organizes an annual UCLA Game Art Festival that has quickly established itself as one of the most important events of its kind. The Program is led by one of the most prominent artists working with videogames and digital media, Eddo Stern.
And let’s not forget the mighty Games & Playable Media Program at University of California Santa Cruz, which features some of the brightest game designers and artists in the field, from Michael Mateas to Noah Wardrip-Fruin, from John Romero, co-creator of Doom, to Brenda Romero, whose games constantly push the boundaries of the medium.
There are other excellent Game Design programs in California - not to mention the rest of the country -, but unfortunately I do not have enough time to discuss them in depth.
But the questions remain:
What can California College of the Arts offer to students eager to become game designers, today?
What can one of the most prominent art and design schools in the United States offer to a new generation of artists?
FROM CRITICAL PLAY...
To answer that question, I would like to borrow the notion of Critical Play, developed by artist and scholar Mary Flanagan (2009).
According to Flanagan (6),
To summarize, according to Flanagan, games create "cognitive and epistemological environments" that have some "meaning". To play critically means "to create or occupy" these playful spaces in order to question, examine, and investigate issues that are central to human life. These questions can be abstract or specific.
In short, I would like to design games at CCA that carefully examine "social, cultural, political" and even "personal themes that function as alternatives to popular play spaces".
What does Flanagan mean by "popular play spaces"? Here are a few examples:
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Activision, 2014
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege, Ubisoft, 2014
Battlefield Hardline, Electronic Arts 2014
My question is do we need to develop more of these "popular play spaces"?
Do we really want out students to invest considerable time, money, and resources to create another Call of Duty or another Battlefield?
I did not think so, either.
We must develop NEW GAMES.
...TO SIMULATING REALITIES
In addition to the notion of Critical Play, I would like to mention an idea developed by Mario Ricco, a professor of Architecture at Politecnico Institute of Milan and art director at software giant Ubisoft, first discussed in a foreword to a book about Sid Meier’s Civilization, which I edited approximately ten years ago.
The contemporary world is too complicated - Mario wrote - as such, it cannot be narrated any longer. Reality can only be simulated. (2005: 12).
This statement was meant as a response to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory that postmodernism marked the end of metanarratives, that is, all-encompassing explanations of reality, grand fictions about fiction that offer a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealized) master idea. Example of metanarratives include Progress, Emancipation, Equality, Meritocracy and other utopian fairy-tales that, nonetheless, shape, influence, and sometimes determine our every day behavior, expectations, and beliefs.
Metanarratives are indeed over, argued Ricco. But they have not been substituted by what Lyotard called petits récits ("small, local narratives"). Instead, they have been replaced by simulations and digital games. The perfect example is Sid Meier’s historical game, which allows players to experience, understand- and perhaps subvert - the historical phenomenon otherwise known as colonialism.
Source: Sid Meier's Civilization V, Firaxis, 2K Games, 2010
In my writings, I have combined Flanagan and Ricco's ideas, suggesting that game design could become a powerful tool for explaining complex systems and phenomena without providing apodictic answers. In other words, critical game design could become a powerful instrument to investigate the status quo and question existing power structures. My goal at CCA is to design games that have wider social, political, environmental implications and impacts, consistent with the school's philosophy.
WHY GAMES?
Unlike traditional, linear narratives, games can generate possible scenarios, situations, and systems. If film offers a replica of reality, framed in narrative terms, games can provide a simulation of reality, or rather, realities.
This means that rather than providing univocal answers, games could be used to raise question that nobody wants to answer.
Games could also be used to predict possible futures. Consider, for instance, the notion of premediation developed by Richard Grusin in Premediation. Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010):
[B]y trying to premediate as many of the possible worlds, or possible paths, as the future could be imagined to take, premediation bears some affinities to the logic of designing a videogame. More like designing a videogame than predicting the future, premediation is not concerned with getting the future right, as much as with trying to map out a multiplicity of possible futures. Premediation would in some sense transform the world into a video or computer game, which only permits certain moves depending on where the player is in the space of the game, how far advanced she is in achieving the goal of the game, of the attributes of the avatar. Although within these premediated moves there are a seemingly infinite number of different possibilities available, only some of these possibilities are encouraged by the protocols and reward systems built into the game." (46)
So what kind of games I would like to design at California College of the Arts?
GAMES THAT MATTER
Today I would like to briefly discuss three projects. Three games to make visible, legible and playable what it means to be alive in and aware of the present moment.
Three games to think creatively and critically, rather than passively accept the hic et nunc.
Three games that, as I have mentioned before, could have wider social, political, environmental implications and impacts than the average shoot'em up.
I am aware that some of these examples could fall under the umbrella of a genre otherwise known as Serious Games and/or meaningful play, but I must confess that I have always found the label “Serious games” problematic as it implicitly - or perhaps not so implicitly - assumes a priori that there are such things as "non-serious games" and "meaningless play".
I think this approach is flawed and potentially counter-productive.
I take the Situationists’ motto “We demand games with great seriousness” as an invitation to play differently, that is, critically. In other words, we do not necessarily need Serious Games, but rather, serious gamers, gamers that are willing to deconstruct the games they play, question their premises, modify and alter their mechanics and outcomes.
A critical player is somebody who has read Pierre Bourdieu and plays Grand Theft Auto.
A critical player is somebody who has read Slavoj Zizek and plays Call of Duty.
A critical player is somebody who has read David Harvey and plays SimCity
The key proposition here is and, not but.
The good news is that there are several artists who have been playing critically for years.
Consider, for instance, the work of Joseph DeLappe, whose in-game interventions in games like America's Army, Quake, Second Life, and The Sims have questioned the ideologies and the agenda embedded in these simulations.
Joseph DeLappe, "dead...whats your point?", dead-in-iraq screenshot 2006-2011
Or think about Angela Washko's gender play in World of Warcraft.
Source: Angela Washko, World of Warcraft performances, 2012-ongoing.
The good news is that there is an entire generation of students who are growing up reading Foucault, Chomski, McLuhan, Munari, West, Zizek, Baudrillard, Mulvey, Hall, De Certeau, Debord, Butler... just to name a few, and playing videogames.
These are the designers that will develop the games of tomorrow.
GAMES THAT MATTER
After all, California College of the Arts promotes meaningful social and cultural change through ART THAT MATTERS.
Let's not forget that MAKING GAMES THAT MATTER is a national priority.
As President Obama stated in December 2013, just before suggesting that an Art History degree is basically useless, children should design rather than buy games.
Source: President Barack Obama asks America to learn Computer Science, Code.org, December 2013
So what kind of games should we design?
I have a few ideas.
Here is the first:
GRAND THEFT SCHOOL
The first game I would love to develop is a simulation of the North American Higher Education System and its many contradictions. Taking Mario Ricco's suggestion that, “when reality becomes to complex, one can only simulate it, rather than explain it with a linear narrative” as a starting point, I am envisioning a game that could make sense of something that I find utterly unintelligible: the Ivory Tower.
As you may know, in the United States academia is undergoing a major crisis, one that led Noam Chomski to state, just a few months ago, that American universities are dead. By all means, this phenomenon is not new, but it has reached a point of no return.
For those who are not aware of what I am talking about, here are a couple of points, which I extrapolated from Keith Holler’s essay included in the important book Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System, a book published in 2014 by Vanderbilt University.
- In the past thirty-eight years, the percentage of professors holding tenure-track positions has been cut nearly in half. Full-time tenure-stream professors went from 45.1 percent of America’s professoriate in 1975 to only 24.1 percent in 2011, with only one in six (16.7 percent) professors now possessing tenure.
- In the meantime, the percentage of professors teaching off the tenure track increased from 54.8 percent in 1975 to 76 percent in 2011. In 1975, there were 268,883 full-time non-tenure-track and part-time professors, as well as 160,806 graduate teaching assistants.
- From 1975 to 2011, the number of tenure-track and tenured professors increased by only 35.6 percent nationwide, while the number of part-time professors increased by 305.3 percent.
- College administrators have gone to great lengths to keep their increasing numbers of adjunct faculty secret from students, parents, legislators, accreditors, foundations, and the public. Unsurprisingly, only 24% of college presidents would like most faculty members to be full-time and tenured (Source: PewResearch, 2011)
- The vast majority of Adjunct Professors are as qualified and experienced as tenured professors. They have the same responsibilities, duties, and hours as their colleagues, but that receive a fraction of their salary, have no job security, no benefits, and no sabbaticals. Nothing at all. They are contingent, precarious, and considere "part-time" even when they teach full time, again with meagre compensation. Some Adjunct professors are considered “visiting”, with the only caveat that they will be “visiting” their school for decades.
- Meanwhile, in the last 10 years, the number of college administrators has increased 369%. As Hoeller convincingly concludes,
“Wal-Mart seems to provide an apt analogy for the economic trend that has occurred in academia. Wal-Mart has become well known for keeping its number of full-time workers to a minimum, and hiring many part-time workers, with low pay, no benefits, and no job security." (Keith Holler, 2014)
Today, across the United States of America, Adjunct Professors experience inequity, discrimination, and exploitation.
Below is one useful chart:
Wait, there is more.
As American colleges were getting massively “adjunctified”, student enrollments increased by 60 percent. Interestingly, between 1975 to 2005, college tuitions have increased tenfold. - The college costs have risen more than 120% since 1978. But in the same period, the hourly wages for 16-24 year olds have declined 18%. (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
This looks like a puzzle game to me.
Here's another useful chart:
Source: Labor Department, National Center for Education Statistics, via The Wall Street Journal
In case you did not know, the Class of 2014 is the most indebted ever in American history: today, more than 70% of American students owe more than 33,000 dollars in student loans. They will be paying back their loans until the die. If they can. Paying, I mean: in our neoliberal times, death and debt are the only certainties.
Source: Mark Kantrowitz analysis of National Center for Education data via The Wall Street Journal
We are facing a serious paradox, an epistemological short-circuit. On one hand, the system puts a premium on education: students are asked to pay incredibly high prices to earn their degree (and the trend is upward). On the other, those who are in charge of providing meaningful learning experiences are not effectively compensated for their work.
In other words, this a truly schizophrenic situation: administrators are simultaneously saying that education is really valuable (if you are a "customer") and worthless (if you are an "employee").
Given this absurd, if not obscene situation, I propose to design Grand Theft School, a game that puts the player in the role of either a young student who wants to fulfill her or his dream to become a professor and earn a decent, honest living or a young student who wants to fulfill her or his dream to learn, earn a degree, and create something that matter, maybe even art.
Source: The Sims 3 University Life, Maxis/Electronic Arts, 2013
Grand Theft School is a game that has many losers and just a handful of winners.
It is a frustrating game, one that puts most players at an unfair disadvantage.
The sad reality is that in the United States, higher education is so flawed, bugged, and glitched that most Adjunct Professors and students can only fail, in the short, mid- and long term.
And since many outside academia are either unaware or incapable to understand how rigged this particular game is, I propose to design a simulation that can generate different situations in order to fully illustrated the depth of the abyss.
In order to design an accurate, useful simulation, the designer of Grand Theft School must research the topic in detail.
Here are some books that could be used as "instruction manuals" or "strategy guides":
This recent PBS News Report neatly summarizes the situation:
Finally, I recommend an essay by Alexandre Afonso (2013) which argues that the academic job market resembles the drug trade business. As Afonso wrote,
The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. Even if the probability that you might get shot in academia is relatively small (unless you mark student papers very harshly), one can observe similar dynamics. Academia is only a somewhat extreme example of this trend, but it affects labour markets virtually everywhere. One of the hot topics in labour market research at the moment is what we call “dualisation”. Dualisation is the strengthening of this divide between insiders in secure, stable employment and outsiders in fixed-term, precarious employment. Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. (Alexandre Afonso, 2013)
Hence, Grand Theft School.
Source:RockStar Games, Grand Theft Auto V Sue Murry Promotional video, 2013
SIMGENTRIFICATION
The second game that I would love to design at CCA is SimGentrification.
As you may know, San Francisco is currently the most despised city in the United States, and rightly so.
The city formerly known as Baghdad on the Bay is experiencing the most radical example of what urbanist Alan Ehrenhalt calls the Great Demographic Inversion, which is a lesser abrasive term than gentrification. One way to think about this is the following equation: genocide is to gentrification what ethnic cleansing is to demographic inversion - the latter simply sound harmless, but substantially, they mean the same thing.
In the last five years, Silicon Valley has "disrupted" San Francisco, creating an unprecedent diaspora.
The City has been taken over by black-box algorithms and drones.
You know that you have a serious problem when the biggest aspiration of the smartest kids graduating from Stanford University is to create a sexting-app. Sadly, this is Silicon Valley's greatest contributon to the world. One hs to quickly learn the Valley's language games: sharing means "selling", improving means "eradicating".
Source: Illustration by Tim Enthoven for The New York Times
I envision a game called SimGentrification, which could be a mod - that is, a modification - of SimCity (note 1) that simulates in real time the effects of what Rebecca Solnit has called a fully-fledged "invasion”.
Source: COLL.EO, Oro en paz y fierro en guerra, 2014
SimGentrification would allow the player to play different roles - for example, that of the long time resident who sees his rent increase by 1000% overnight and thus faces eviction; that of a Google bus driver trying to avoid barricades and protesters in the streets (after all, "since 2011, 69 percent of the no-fault evictions have occurred within four blocks of a private bus shuttle stop for tech company employees,"source: Newsweek, 2014), or that of a landlord hitting the jackpot thanks to the new gold rush/dot.com bubble. You can also play the role of the entitled techie who has to deal with a series of daily struggles, like a delayed delivery of cold pressed juices to the office caused by a drone malfunction. You can also play the role of a private security guard for the Google bus, before RoboCop takes over. Possibilities are endless.
Design-wise, I am imagining something along the lines of SimCity meets Tropico, with a dash of Mike Judge's Silicon Valley. Basically, an accurate depiction of 2014 San Francisco, as described by Kevin Roose. The game should also feature a powerful mapping editor designed by Stamen Design.
Source: SimCity, Maxis/EA, 2013
Source: Tropico 5, Deep Silver, 2014
Source: Stamen Design, watercolor map app, 2013
Thanks to SimGentrification, players can experience, albeit in vicarious form, the eradication of middle class families from the city, the sudden disappearance of alternative creative spaces, read: non-corporate, and the proliferation of coffee houses inhabited by hipsters glued to their laptops while sipping an $8 cappuccino.
Imagine the thrill!
Experience the excitement!
Once again, in order to design the game a little research is needed.
The latest issue of BOOM. A Journal of California (Summer 2014), is a great starting point, especially the interview with Rebecca Solnit. Here's an excerpt:
So what’s the matter with San Francisco? It’s becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, while Silicon Valley becomes a global power center for information control run by a bunch of crazy libertarian megalomaniacs. And a lot of what’s made San Francisco really generative for the environmental movement and a lot of other movements gets squeezed out. And it feels like the place is being killed in some way. (Rebecca Solnit, 2014)
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